Sunday, September 02, 2007

In praise of American thought

America, the vilified, the villain, acts as a whipping boy for the world's indignation. To call the US incursions into Iraq and Afghanistan unpopular would be an understatement. In spite of the grounds - or lack thereof - prefiguring its supposed imperialism, it would be wrong to summarily condemn America, its citizens, and the ideas borne from its turbulent history. It was Tocqueville who first grasped the potential and perils of American democracy. Indeed, after a Civil War, numerous foreign conflicts, slavery - then segregation and ostensibly disenfranchisement, the ideas and ideals girding the very notion of America are constantly under threat - diminished, nearly forgotten, and their demise no longer inconceivable.

A history of pragmatism - stretching from early statesman and revolutionaries like Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln, through great minds like Oliver Wendell Holmes, William James, and John Dewey, and leading up to contemporary voices for democracy like Cornel West - has been swept aside. The new destiny, represented as an old, immutable one in the form of a "national calling" - ironically built around the dissemination of freedom and democracy throughout the globe - is implicitly derived from Hegel's philosophy of history and adopts Marxist method - more appropriately, an appropriation of Trotsky's "permanent revolution". For pragmatism, knowledge can be adaptable in pursuit of truth. For the latter, ostensibly operating in our present times, truth is immutable, while the world is malleable, adaptable, and, hence, disposable and superfluous in the service of Truth.

What I propose - and what I would like to investigate - is a form of pragmatism forged by great thinkers confronted by substantial and profoundly difficult problems of American political context. C.S. Peirce - the great logican and thinker - starts us off with the problem: the problem of chaos, a world outside of determinism, a 'chancy' existence. Peirce, by refuting with his requisite zeal any kind of determinism, demonstrates to us that in all things governed by law, there can be no certainty, only probabilities. In a world without certainty, where divine providence is assumed MIA, man is assured of no favourable odds, no longer sheltered from the whimsical hand of risk. He can still reason and analyze, but whatever decision he arrives at may still go terribly array. Faced with such odds, some - often those in positions of power and influence - throw up their hands, succumb to the pressure, and just invoke an otherworldly power of guessing - the great American satirist and humanist Kurt Vonnegut presciently lampooned contemporary decision makers as "guessers", playing rock, paper, scissors with the lives of its citizens at stake. In what way is that democratic? Well, on a semiotic level it is. Of course, Charles Sanders Pierce, ironically, has been called the creator of semiotics. Pierce thought semiotics as any action of affect that involved a sign, its object, and an interpretant. Does this triadic relationship translate into the political context? Is it as simple as a sign, a lie-truth, and citizen-dupes? No, that would be a crude and disjointed account. Peirce, the popularizer of pragmatism, objects, things, and the interaction of people with them over high unseen predetermined ideals. With that began an encounter between a pragmatism unique to the American context and an idealism, as exhibited in the work of emigre thinkers such as (but not limited to) Eric Voegelin, Hannah Arendt, and Leo Strauss, which derived largely from German philosophy - Kant, Hegel, and even Herder.

The richness of American thought is owed to this unique convergence of continental philosophy and homegrown pragmatic thought, for a lack of a better term. This study does not intend to sanctify one wing in relation to another. It intends to first, draw out the historical and philosophical ties of these two tradition, second, to demonstrate the influence both exerted on major political events, and lastly, to diagnose the current maladies afflicting contemporary politics in America.

[Part I]